Welcome to the jungle, we've got giant snakes - with Dr. David Polly

On today's episode of Earth on the Rocks we have Dr. David Polly, a vertebrate paleontologist interested in how past changes (geologically, climatically, environmentally) have affected life and how life may have responded or adapted in turn. Learn about sampling of fossils (both in the field and from museums), what the early internet was like and David's experience at the front lines of it, the giant fossil snake Titanoboa, national monuments and their vital role in paleontology (and how that resulted in David being called to Congress to testify), and learning Finnish through reading The Hobbit.

What is Earth on the Rocks?

Welcome to Earth on the Rocks, a show where we get to know the person behind the science over drinks. Each episode will highlight a new scientist in the earth and atmospheric sciences to learn more about their journey, what interests them, and who they are outside of their science.

Host: Shelby Rader
Producer: Cari Metz
Artwork: Connor Leimgruber
Board Operator: Kate Crum, Betsy Leija
Funding for this podcast was provided by the National Science Foundation grant EAR-2422824.

Shelby: 00:07

Hi, folks, and welcome back to Earth on the Rocks, the show where we get to know the person behind the science. I'm your host, Shelby Rader, and joining us today is Doctor. David Polly. David, thanks for coming on.

David: 00:16

Hi, Shelby. Thanks.

Shelby: 00:18

So as we get to know you, presumably over drinks, what would be your drink of choice or drink of non choice if there's one you never want to have again? Some of those have been quite entertaining this season.

David: 00:28

If it was right now, it'd be coffee.

Shelby: 00:30

Just black?

David: 00:31

Just black.

Shelby: 00:32

Any specific brand, or is there a local place that you prefer here in Bloomington?

David: 00:37

Just black.

Shelby: 00:38

K.

David: 00:41

In three hours, it would be a beer.

Shelby: 00:43

Okay. So happy hour maybe. Happy hour beer. What style of beer do you have a preference? That's a classic.

Shelby: 00:49

For folks that are listening, how would you sort of classify yourself if someone said, what sort of scientist are you?

David: 00:55

I am a paleontologist. And then it sort of spirals out into things more complicated there.

Shelby: 01:00

What does this sort of term paleontologist mean? And then what could it potentially spiral into depending on the audience?

David: 01:05

Paleontologist studies the past history of life, which immediately takes it into geology and into past climates and into biology. And I'm a vertebrate paleontologist, which often means it's a lot of anatomy and biological structures, which is almost three different disciplines. But I myself, what I look at is the ways in which past climate changes or tectonic changes or continental changes or other environmental changes, how that has affected life and how life has responded or adapted or become extinct or what have you to it.

Shelby: 01:38

And I'm assuming when you say, you know, some of these changes, they need to be sort of big enough scale that they might impact animal evolution.

David: 01:45

Yes. So that's a research question right there. As to what extent can you see the impacts of changes at different scales, very, very small scale versus very large scale in organisms and to what extent could you measure them in the fossil record? And if so, then, you know, sort of what are the boundaries on what we can know by looking at the fossil record?

Shelby: 02:05

And I've recognized that's probably a very complicated question, but can you give sort of a high level overview of maybe what some of those answers might be? So like what is the scale that it feels like you could see these sorts of changes occurring?

David: 02:18

Sometimes it's a surprisingly small scale. So if you looked at populations of living animals, seeing the difference between a population here and a population down on the Gulf Coast, you probably could, both in terms of like literally the the structures of that organism, but also sort of the kind of variation between them or that they're just a little bit different. But at the same time, in order to see that it's really a statistical thing, it's a very small scale thing where you need a big sample size and when you're looking in the fossil record and especially as you go further back in time, you usually have smaller and smaller samples. So there's a separate kind of sampling scaling there. So if you go back, say the time of dinosaur extinction and you were looking I specialize in fossil mammals.

David: 03:00

If you're looking fossil mammals, you might be lucky to have one or two specimens, you know, individual literally individual animals and the kinds of questions you can ask there. You don't have the statistical power, you would be looking at something more like a major adaptation, which would represent a bigger scale environment change or extinction.

Shelby: 03:19

And when you're, you know, going back sort of into this deeper time, like the time of dinosaurs, how are these samples being utilized? Are these primarily museum collections? Are you working with folks who are actively trying to find, you know, additional samples in the field? Because I, like you said, I could imagine that sort of sample size could be limited for especially certain periods of time that could make this more difficult.

David: 03:44

Mhmm. It's very true. And I have done both, worked, with museum collections and in the field myself or with people working in the field, partly depending on the question and partly depending on where in my career we were talking about. But people who may not know when, for the most part, when fossils are discovered. So they may be discovered because somebody has gone out in the field to ask a particular question about a particular place and time, and they collect the fossils.

David: 04:08

Usually, they go into some sort of a museum repository. There's two reasons for that. One, so somebody else can later come along and verify what they said about them. And to do that, you need to look at those same fossils. But also by putting in the museum then over years, decades, centuries, you get more and more fossils from more and more places and more and more times.

David: 04:28

So you can ask more synthetic questions. So a lot of the ones I ask rely a lot of the ones that most paleontologists ask rely on museum collections. So from any particular research project to mine, I might have to go to five to 10 museums to collect data from a set of organisms that fit together into that picture in one way or the other. But I've also worked on projects for a long time. I worked on a project called the ancient human occupation of Britain, which was looking at changes over the last five hundred thousand years in Northwest Europe, which was going through glacial and interglacial cycles.

David: 05:01

Humans were there sometimes, humans were not there sometimes and we were working to put that record in order in the sense that some of it was collected a hundred or even two hundred years ago and when people didn't understand or didn't have the tools for the precision that we would have now say for looking at the time periods. So now we know what the glacial interglacial cycle has been and trying to pin all those sites into that framework and then really look at a fine scale change.

Shelby: 05:29

And so for for that example you just gave, you know, where there are more modernly collected samples versus some that were collected a couple hundred years ago, where metadata that went along with this collection could be quite variable. How difficult is it to try to take these samples that were collected one hundred or two hundred years ago and then try to figure out where in that record they fall?

David: 05:54

It depends on how well the data were kept in the first place. Usually, if you know the precise location where something came from, then you can reconstruct. In that particular project, which involved a whole lot of people, not just me, there was a lot of revisiting of sites, reopening them, seeing what the stratigraphy was like, taking new dates, lots of new interesting discoveries. And so for example, the earliest humans in Britain at the time, something on the order of about 500,000 years and reopening some of those sites discovered new material and new stratigraphy that pushed it back to to close to a million, certainly to 750,000. And there are some cases where the site no longer exists.

David: 06:35

So like if it was in London, there's some reasonable chance that it's been paved over, bulldozed away, or had something built on it or what have you. So sometimes you can, sometimes you can't.

Shelby: 06:45

And so some of this information you just talked about in terms of, you know, stratigraphy or dating. Can you tell us a little bit more about when you're in the field and you you find a fossil specimen, how do you get that sort of context to understand where in the record it comes from? Maybe roughly how old it is? What else goes into retrieving that specimen beyond just excavating it?

David: 07:07

Mhmm. In 2026, it is probably easier than it used to be because most sites have had some reasonable amount of work done on them, we probably go to the site thinking we know what age is and what its environmental context is now. That may not always be true and if we were talking a hundred and fifty years ago, then you would probably be doing it for scratch and so but today, it probably would involve depending on the the age and the context, some sort of biostratigraphic dating, which is what species are there and where we may know how old that species is already. What would that say about the age? Maybe or maybe not radiometric dating of one sort or another.

David: 07:47

Now, almost certainly isotopic analyses of some sort which if the the history of that is a lot shorter than some of the other. And so in many cases, a site will have never had that done before.

Shelby: 08:01

And you also mentioned this idea of reopening a site. So can you tell us like what what designates something as a site? And then how does one reopen a site?

David: 08:11

Anybody who's tried to keep a database of fossil occurrences, the I the question of what is a site is somewhat philosophical and and slippery concept. Sometimes it's very clear and sometimes it's not. But usually it is the location where things were found in the past and what that means depends on the context. Sometimes that's 10 or 15 miles of coastline where things have been found from a particular unit all the way along that. Sometimes it's a much more general area and depending on the question being asked, maybe trying to pinpoint the exact location and then sometimes, re exposing rock to have a new look at the layers that are there, reinvestigate what those layers are.

David: 08:57

Do we see the same thing that the original author saw? If not, why taking new samples from them, see if there's anything else there that wasn't taken the first time and so on.

Shelby: 09:06

Yeah. And like you you sort of alluded to earlier, I can imagine that some areas you know might be great to try to go and reopen but if they're in a region that has has now been heavily populated, that's probably next to impossible in in a lot of cases.

David: 09:21

Another fun example of that. The first Tyrannosaurus Rex was found in a particular place. But that particular place is now under the water in Fort Breck Reservoir in Montana. And so you can't exactly go there anymore.

Shelby: 09:34

That seems like a big loss. So, you know, we we've talked a little bit about, like, a specific example now, some of the stuff that you've done. But what are some of the broad questions that, you know, now or over the course of your career, you've tried to address or answer? And then after that, we'll sort of get into some ways that you go about that.

David: 09:55

Mhmm. Certainly for the last long while, the broader question that I'm interested in is knowing what climatic and environmental changes were in the past. Finding ways to measure or quantify and analyze the changes that resulted from that and there's generally three kinds of changes. One species can become extinct or a local population of the species could become extinct. So for example, something that's found in Indiana could become extinct here even though it's not extinct somewhere else.

David: 10:30

That's one one method of response. The other is adapting to it. So if there was a change here, instead of becoming extinct, some evolution could happen. You know, given that the environment's changed, an adaptation arises that would allow the same group of organisms to flourish where it might not have been able to before. And then there's the intermediate of basically tracking that change.

David: 10:53

So if the climate is getting warmer and you can move north where the temperature was historically cooler, you track your own ideal conditions to some other location, so you change biogeographically. All of those are possible and particularly with sort of future climate change and the rate it's happening now, it becomes a really important and interesting question. How fast can organisms do any of that? What are the circumstances? Can we learn anything from the past that would give us some idea what to expect for species now?

Shelby: 11:22

And with some of these changes you mentioned, I'm assuming in the fossil record, there are times that you can sort of track this geographical movement of different species. And I would also imagine that there are some physical traits that change that you could track in the fossil record. So what would some of those potentially be? And how do you track either of those in the work that you do?

David: 11:42

In order to ask those questions, you would have to choose a time, place, and the type of organism where you can measure those. And some sometimes in places in organisms you can and some you can't. I usually work on mammals and there are all sorts of advantages and disadvantages to different kinds of fossil record, but one thing about mammals is we have complex teeth and to some extent, a tooth is to a species what a fingerprint is to an individual. If you have one of the cheek teeth, chances are good you can tell what species it was. Teeth are hard.

David: 12:20

They preserve in the fossil record really well. So even if you have nothing else, you at least have, I know the species was here at a certain time and place. So that makes them pretty good for that. If you were looking at another group like birds which have no teeth and their bones break easily and they're not all that often fossilized anyway, it might be a hopeless question to ask of them. And same thing as you come forward in time, the fossil records usually richer and you have fossil deposits in a whole lot of different locations, whereas if you go to certain time periods, you may only have a five million year band.

David: 12:54

You may only have one site in one place. So you choose the study system fairly carefully and or vice versa if you're working in one study question, know what the limits are and sort of bound the questions that you're asking with that study system. And then one of the interesting issues is if you have data from several of those study systems through different periods of time, the entire picture only emerges from considering all of them. And especially then if we're thinking about comparing it things we observe now, we're we're not even looking at the fossil record. And some of my research has been just simply about that in a kind of a statistical and methodological way.

Shelby: 13:31

And you mentioned, you know, this idea of sort of teeth as as a form of a fingerprint. Do you have a sense of what the oldest tooth that's been found is and that has been used in in this sort of way?

David: 13:43

The oldest mammal tooth or the oldest tooth. All vertebrates have teeth and they go back to the early radiation and multicellular Cambrian sometimes 500 ish million years ago. And even with with non mammal teeth, they're mineralized things so you can get all sorts of information out of them, including isotopic records and the useful fossil record of mammals in that sense is it sort of predates the extinction of dinosaurs for the last sixty five million years.

Shelby: 14:13

That's sort of amazing that we have these sort of tools to be able to do this. So what sorts of mammals or other animals or other species have you worked on?

David: 14:22

My expertise is mammal carnivores. And there's sort of a funny story of how that happened because I was an undergraduate and had taken a paleontology class which is where I really interested in it. I had never really thought about it before that, but it was sort of an introduction to to life through time basically. And the person teaching it had done research on how you tell the relationships between organisms called phylogeny, where you look at the characteristics and look at their hierarchical relationships and build a tree from it. And one of the things I've always liked to do is computer programming and this instructor would say things like, so you take features of these organisms, you put them into the computer and you get a tree.

David: 15:04

And knowing something about programming and knowing the features he was talking about, I couldn't figure out how on earth would you do that. What what do you mean I you take these features and you put them into the computer and get a tree out of it. So I was interested. So I went and said, you know, I'd like to I need to do a a senior thesis. I'd like to do it on this.

David: 15:26

And I was an undergraduate and I hadn't thought very deeply about that. I'd sort of thought about the computational side, but hadn't thought about anything else. He immediately asked the question that anyone ought to have imagined being the next question, which is, well, what group would you like to work on? What group of organisms? And I hadn't even expected that question.

David: 15:47

So I'm sitting there not wanting to look stupid and thinking what what animals do I like. I like cats. I like dogs. I like lions. And then thinking to myself, what what was the name of that group?

David: 16:00

And finally came out with carnivora. I wanna work on carnivora. So that's how I chose it, and that's I still work on them. But then I've worked on all sorts of others, and especially now having had twenty years of graduate students who have been interested in different things through them. I've worked on on dinosaurs and on snakes and on lizards and on fish and on brachiopods and so on.

Shelby: 16:23

All sorts of things. All sorts of things. Do you have a favorite? I feel like I probably know the answer based on what you just said, but maybe it'll be a surprise.

David: 16:30

No. It probably is carnivores. And interestingly, I did my my PhD work on a a specific extinct group that were thought to be the closest relatives of of carnivores, which especially at the time were called creodonts, which were a fairly obscure group. And it is interesting even though I haven't worked on them for a long time. I don't necessarily know that they're my favorite.

David: 16:51

But if I get a paper to review, I feel like I'm really competent. And then whereas I get a paper to review on something else and I often feel that I can don't know them as nearly as well.

Shelby: 17:02

Yeah. So there were several things you mentioned that I want to sort of jump off on. One is you said that you really liked computer programming. And is it true that you worked on one of the first websites?

David: 17:15

Yes.

Shelby: 17:15

So can you tell us about that? What was the website? How did you get involved in that? What was that like to be sort of at the cutting edge of what now I'm sure people listening to this take for granted the fact that we have this really great resource in the World Wide Web.

David: 17:31

I was a graduate student in let's think. This would have been about nineteen ninety two and three. Some form of Internet had been around for quite a while at that point and I was somewhat familiar with it. So I, to the best I can remember, I had my first email account when I was an undergraduate.

Shelby: 17:52

Do you remember what the email was? What the email account or program was?

David: 17:57

It would have been off a mainframe. And do I remember exactly what it was called? I think it was called a Bitnet account. Okay. But it was a mainframe account where you would log in with the terminal.

David: 18:08

And interestingly, my grandmother was one of the first other people who I knew who had an email account. That's incredible. I don't know. But sometime sometime in the late late eighties, maybe mid to late eighties is probably when both she and I got our first email accounts. But there wasn't a whole lot else you would do.

David: 18:26

And then starting in the early nineties, there is more of what we would really think of as Internet now. And I was a graduate student, and there was a a guy who actually he was an undergraduate, but who had some computer knowledge and he'd been hired to help maintain one of the servers that was doing what we still know as ArcGIS. But you had to have a major workstation to run it then. He got to showing me stuff and I was just amazed that suddenly it was quite apparent that you could hit a key here and it would make a disc whir somewhere on the other side of the world and give you some information back from that. It was just absolutely fascinating.

David: 19:06

There wasn't all that much to see on it because it was mostly academic. There was no web at that point, but there was what was called Gopher, which is basically files where you could pull the file and it could be an image or could be a sound or it could just be a text file or something like that, but you could sort of browse through.

Shelby: 19:23

And gopher like the animal.

David: 19:24

Yes. Okay. And also gopher like sending sending a gopher to do something for you and bring something back.

Shelby: 19:32

Right.

David: 19:32

So yes. That guy decided he was gonna do a PhD in paleontology and so enrolled in the program and he went out into the field and he was gonna be on a fellowship. So his position needed to be filled and so I took that basically as an R, what we would call an position now to to be the the network or the server person for the Museum of Paleontology at University of California Berkeley. And as he was going off, he said, oh, you know, there's this thing I've heard about. It's called the World Wide Web.

David: 20:01

We should we should start a server sometime. And so while he was gone, I decided, let's let's see if we can do this. And so looked up information. At that point, you had to download the stuff and you'd compile it and see and configure the server so that it could be read. And I created one and he came back and at some point said, you know, we should we should do this.

David: 20:25

And I said, ah, we have one. And so that was I think sometime like August or September 1993. And so, he and I and a couple of other people, his girlfriend at the time, some other students, really started to thought, you know, this is a really nice thing where you could come and you could see something about fossils. You can see something about the Museum of paleontology at Berkeley. We had a digital catalog and realized that actually you could interface the digital catalog into the web pages and maybe you could create something where people could learn about fossils and then also then see what the actual evidence was for it from the from the catalog.

David: 21:02

So we developed that and somewhere in there, there was a big project, Internet project to connect the Bay Area in California with Southern California which was known as the information superhighway, which now is synonymous with the web but it was actually a specific project. And Al Gore had been involved in that and so there was suddenly a lot of media attention. And so people were looking for something, what what is tangible about the the Internet. And of course, the web was much more tangible than anything else. Nobody cares about email.

David: 21:36

Nobody cares about transferring a data file no matter how important it is. But when you could look at something and see pictures, you couldn't. And so suddenly there was a lot of media attention. In fact, there was supposed to be a White House tour of our site. And one of the interesting things is almost nobody put any pictures on their websites.

David: 21:55

And you could literally sit down for a couple of hours in the afternoon and look at every web page that existed. And there were there were two or three. NASA had some pictures and we had some pictures and we had pictures of dinosaurs. And so suddenly our site everywhere. It was on the cover of science.

David: 22:12

It was, I can't remember where all it was. It was on the poster of the the second international worldwide web convention

Shelby: 22:23

Oh, wow.

David: 22:24

Whatever. And actually at the time, something I was gonna mention just a second ago when I was compiling that, you know, somebody had written the software. You would go download the, you know, the code and you'd compile it and whatever. And you always had questions and usually you'd write to the person who'd written the code, which was this guy in at CERN in Switzerland named Tim Berners Lee. So, you know, I'd write him a question and say, how do you do this?

David: 22:46

And he's now very widely recognized as the creator of the web.

Shelby: 22:51

That's incredible. Did you all

David: 22:53

And I and I got my first job. The very first job I had outside of of my PhD was being a consultant for Genentech doing building them a web service for their their organization, which we would now call an Internet.

Shelby: 23:07

That's incredible. Did you all ever get your White House visit?

David: 23:10

Nope. There was a a big development that looked like, quote unquote, it was going to be peace in The Middle East, which obviously did not work out in the end, but there were all sorts of other things that suddenly took precedent.

Shelby: 23:21

Right. And when you were sort of telling the story and you said, you know, you had to go look stuff up to to figure out how to to sort of build this. Were you looking this up on library related things? Or were you were you

David: 23:35

What a good question. I don't remember because, of course, you couldn't look it up on

Shelby: 23:39

the internet. Right. Yeah. Because I think, like, for people that are

David: 23:41

listening No. Would usually be experimenting and looking at what was then Unix rather than Linux manuals or writing to somebody and asking them or finding somebody who was an IT person and asking them.

Shelby: 23:52

But a much more labor intensive version of looking things up than what I think a lot of young listeners especially would recognize.

David: 24:00

Both more difficult but also maybe easier.

Shelby: 24:04

Yeah. Maybe not as many.

David: 24:07

Sometimes fewer sources makes it easier than lots of sources.

Shelby: 24:10

Yeah. Mean because you are you can't go to the internet to look things up because you're on the forefront of building what later becomes the Internet. Is the website that you created, is some version of that still still around?

David: 24:22

Yes. In fact, there are some pages of it that you can go and look and there's a little author link at the bottom and you'll find that some of those pages that I created are still there.

Shelby: 24:31

That's amazing. So do you still have a passion for that sort of work? Do you incorporate that in any of your research or

David: 24:37

other parts? Research Most of definitely involves false coding as we would now call it. Yeah. So yes, I actually do maintain several websites but it's they're about tenth level priority in my mind.

Shelby: 24:49

Yeah. Yeah. Also, it's amazing you had what was likely one of the first email accounts and as well as your grandmother that's I don't know. I find that thrilling that she had an email account. That's amazing.

Shelby: 24:59

You had also talked really switching gears back now about some of these other species that you had worked on before. And you mentioned snakes. And I know you were involved in the identification of, the largest snake fossil that has been identified. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Like what that process was like?

David: 25:24

One of my longest term collaborators and probably the person I've done most papers with is somebody named Jason Head. I was a postdoc at University of Michigan and he was, an undergraduate and we met there partly because at the time we both smoked and you had to go out on loading dock to smoke and meet the people who were smokers and we get to to know each other. And after he went to graduate school and got involved in things, were still in touch and and started to do collaborations except, you know, he worked on snakes and other reptiles. This is a little bit of an exaggeration, but it's true.

David: 25:58

He would always like to to say it's so difficult to work on snakes. David, you work on mammals. You can do anything with mammals because you can tell what they are and you have a rich fossil record and you have statistical power and whatever. And you look at a snake and there's nothing you can do. It's a little vertebrae, what, just so jealous.

David: 26:10

And I'd say, well, no, Jason. Actually, maybe you could do that with snakes. And then we would sort of figure out a way to do something with them. And one of the things about a snake is you can kind of imagine if you think about it. Fossils, what are they?

David: 26:25

They're parts of the skeleton. They're usually not the whole skeleton, they're usually some part of it. And snakes, probably everybody knows, they're they can really envelop their jaws around a piece of prey, which also means that once they're a skeleton and a skull, it simply falls into all of its pieces. So if you find this fossil snake, chances are good and what you have is a single vertebra from their back because that's mostly what they are. Or maybe you find a rib, if you're lucky you find a tooth and if you're lucky you find a piece of skull, but mostly you find an isolated vertebra.

David: 26:55

And they go from the neck through the body to the tail and the tail is really thin, the middle is thick and the neck is thin, so the size of those vertebrae change. And if you just have one of them, then you're maybe a little bit stuck. Is this a, you know, let's say it's a medium sized vertebrae. Is this the large vertebra of a small snake or is this the small vertebra of a larger snake? So there's just all sorts of things you couldn't know.

David: 27:20

And one of the early things we've done was use morphometrics, which is a shape statistical quantified way of dealing with complex shapes. Measured the shape all the way through a whole lot of different snakes. So you have two problems. If it's a little bit different, is it some different place in the body or is it some different snake? And so tried to extract from that, sort of the equivalent of a regression.

David: 27:42

What is it that's common through the body from neck to tail for all snakes? And then what would be different from that? And if you know that first, if you have an unknown one, you could make a good statistical placement. Where is it in the body? And once you know where it is in the body, then you can try to decide how large the snake was and so on.

David: 28:02

So we had just been working on that. And one of our other friends or collaborators at University of Florida who was working in South America on South American mammals, they'd been collaborating with some people who were paleobotanists who were working in a coal mine down there in Columbia. And they had found some vertebrate bones and they brought them back to this guy. He, like me, works on mammals. He recognized it wasn't a mammal and figured it was probably a reptile.

David: 28:27

He hands it to Jason. Jason says, that's a snake. And it was clearly a big snake. And because we had been working on this, it was sort of ready made for us that we could plug that into this and figure out where it was and then make the calculation of exactly how big it was. And yes, the biggest snake there was which I think it was Jason who came up with the name for it, Titanoboa, which got published.

David: 28:52

And that that also goes back to the Internet because that was leaked the day before it was supposed to have been

Shelby: 28:59

Leaked on the Internet.

David: 29:00

So it was a press embargoed. There was supposed to be a press release from the publisher and etcetera, but somebody leaked it. I think it was in like the Independent or something like that in London. Got a pre story on it. And having worked on this first web pages where in one afternoon, you can look at everything.

David: 29:17

When that was leaked, you can see the statistics on Google. Like, by that evening, it was you got more than a million hits.

Shelby: 29:23

Wow. On

David: 29:24

the largest snake ever to live. So yes, that was a major thing and has all sorts of cultural resonance. Video games that have Titanoboa in it. Go to the Burning Man Festival and see the robotic Titanoboa and things like that.

Shelby: 29:41

So your fingerprints are on all sorts of cultural happenings through the internet and through Titanoboa. You're everywhere, David. How big was the largest snake?

David: 29:52

If you were standing here and it was lying on the floor and you were up next to the middle of it, its back would come up to, depending on how tall you are, somewhere between your thigh and your waist.

Shelby: 30:04

Wow. So very large. So this piece, this fossilized portion of it that you all were given Mhmm. I'm assuming that was a vertebrae?

David: 30:12

Originally, yes. And how Some vertebrae and and some some ribs was was originally found.

Shelby: 30:17

And how big was that component that was handed to you? Because earlier, for folks that are listening, David sort of held up his fingers about a centimeter apart to describe a snake vertebrae.

David: 30:26

So imagine you were at a zoo or a very expensive pet shop and there was a really big boa constrictor and that boa constrictor was long enough to be something like 12 feet long or something that would appear to be a really big snake and have body about as big around as as most people's calves at least. The vertebra of that thing is probably about the diameter of your thumbnail.

Shelby: 30:52

Wow.

David: 30:53

So because then it has ribs on

Shelby: 30:55

it. Right.

David: 30:56

So something with a vertebra that big is gonna have ribs about like circling your fingers. And that's a big snake, right? Yeah. Titanoboa's vertebra is more like what the diameter of that snake would be.

Shelby: 31:08

Right.

David: 31:08

So its ribs would have been more on the scale of your entire arm. So reaching around to hug somebody would be be kind of the scale of

Shelby: 31:17

That's incredible. That's hard to sort of wrap your mind around.

David: 31:21

I mean, it's interesting too going back to the other the the research questions because it is pretty clear that today's climate even in the tropics, is not warm enough to sustain a snake that big because anybody who's thought about raising snakes, you should have to have a heat lamp because they need to to stay warm to have their physiology pumped up. And even in the tropics, the temperatures are not really warm enough to sustain that kind of an animal at that size.

Shelby: 31:47

And so I'm assuming from what you just said, you all can take, you know, those skeletal remains and make some assumptions about what the climate at the time must have been to be able

David: 31:56

to sustain an Paper animal that's had a sort of proto scaling of the size of a of a non warm blooded animal, its size versus the sort of the mean annual temperature.

Shelby: 32:09

Right. That's that's such a fascinating way to apply that information. So also first of all, for folks that are listening, you're very well known in your field and have done a lot of really incredible things, some of which we've sort of highlighted here. But you also have have sort of been active, especially the last few years, in helping to protect some really vital areas. So most recently, places like Grand Staircase and Escalante and Bears Ear.

Shelby: 32:38

And so maybe that's an aspect of, you know, things you've been involved in that that like folks may not think of when they think of someone in an academic position. So can you just talk a little bit about like what was it you all were working on and attempting to do and and sort of what's that process and how does your background or or expertise in some of the work that you've done sort of play into your role there?

David: 32:59

Yeah. Sort of as alluded to before in paleontology, continued access to the actual fossils is key and especially when you get into vertebrates that are rare. So you work on geochemistry, many geochemistry things you could order a tank of gas or have fossils from a rock unit which is really extensive or something like that. But there may only be some like Titanoboa, there's just a handful of fossils known. You can't there's just not an endless supply.

David: 33:28

If somebody else wants to study them, chances of being able to get a new original one are slim and you need to to be able to go to the actual fossils that were studied. So it's it's very important scientifically for scientific verification as well as more synthetic studies that the site where they came from be known, so you can return to it the fossil itself going to repository, etcetera. So vertebrate paleontologists especially because vertebrates are more rare than than many kind of fossils have have been concerned with this and I was fortunate enough to have been elected as president of one of the the main professional society for vertebrates which is the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology where parts of its mission are ethical and legal regulation etcetera relating to the protection of fossils and the society has advocated a lot in The US and elsewhere for legal protection for vertebrate fossils, which now exist on US federal land. And, so I just become president. That was not really any of my expertise.

David: 34:29

I knew a little bit about it, but not a whole lot. And just after I had stepped into that role, we as a society on behalf of of some of our members who advocated for it, there was the sudden establishment of a new national monument in, Southeastern Utah, which became called Bears Ears. And we wrote a letter to the White House pointing out the paleontology that that was there. For a national monument, it's a set of federal lands that's designated for a particular purpose that is either archaeological, historical, scientific where once it's been designated then you can't do things like stake mining claims on it for example. And whatever it's designated for, that's given the highest priority for for conservation over other possible uses, which makes it different from sort of ordinary federal range land.

David: 35:20

So we'd advocated for that and in fact when Bears Ears was established, was dominantly for native American cultural reasons, but then secondarily for the paleontological resources. Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument also in Southern Utah was established about the same time as that website was created. And in the subsequent decades, there were things important there when it was designated and it was designated primarily for paleontology. And since it was designated, just tremendous amounts of research were done there because it was a national monument. There was a scientific coordinator who was employed with the monument who made sure that the vertebrate paleontologist actually talked to the paleo botanist and actually talked to other people and actually talked to the isotope geochemist.

David: 36:03

And a lot of what we know about the late Cretaceous now, one could argue, was known because that had been established as a national monument. So about that time, was the presidential elections Trump was elected as president. And one of the first things that he did was declare by executive order that that those monuments were being downsized. And because of the need for that scientific preservation and because of the extra value of being a national monument. And also because that was the first example in The US of rolling back protections.

David: 36:38

All There aren't many protections to begin with in The US and one of them is rolled back. So we decided that we would try to take action and we we joined with several other groups and filed lawsuits against that which for better or worse are actually literally still ongoing today. Years later.

Shelby: 36:56

And sort of what was your role in that beyond what you just described? Like, I'm sure that there were other aspects of that that you, you know, had to be critical in, for things to sort of progress to the point where they are?

David: 37:10

Yeah. One, I'm the person who really worked with legal teams and the other partners. In fact, at first, lot of the partners didn't realize either that paleontology was so important in the establishment of those monuments or in fact that the paleontological resources there cover almost every inch of the ground. So anybody who says, oh, we can roll back the boundaries and still protect the same objects. If you're talking about the fossils, that's just blindingly obviously not true.

David: 37:36

So provide a lot of evidence that went into our papers, provided declarations, answered questions. And so a couple of things that happened, they involved a mandate to the Department of Interior by the Department of Justice when something that might be damaging happened on the downsized areas that it be reported to us. So saying that, you know, there's road work being done in this area. Is it gonna hurt something? That was part of it.

David: 38:07

It was called the congress to testify in committee.

Shelby: 38:09

Was that the first time you had done that?

David: 38:11

Yes. The only time I have done that. So it's for the one of the house committees. It's related to public lands. And

Shelby: 38:17

was that was that a nerve wracking experience?

David: 38:20

A little bit. It was in retrospect, it actually wasn't that bad but it's the first time I had done anything like that.

Shelby: 38:29

Yeah. And then, you know, you also said that you had worked with these legal teams. Was that sort of the first time that you had had been that sort of heavily involved in working with legal teams? Because that kind

David: 38:39

of Yes. Not I you know, I'd done done a little bit before. But, you know, this for a long time, it was weekly meetings with two different legal teams. So three or four hours a week, working with them, and among other things, have really gotten spoiled because they're two of the top environmental law firms in The US. And some of the people who are on those cases are just really remarkable and have sometimes since worked with other legal teams.

David: 39:07

And you can just blindingly see the difference in the level of quality.

Shelby: 39:11

And you mentioned that this is still ongoing. So this has been sort of a drawn out process. Can you give sort of an update on like what the status currently is and what you all maybe see as or envision as maybe happening?

David: 39:25

Right. There's three main phases. One was our original lawsuits, which went to a judge in the national level federal courts in Washington DC, the DC District, where a lot of things were filed. And for whatever reason, the judge never ruled on it. Still hasn't ruled on it.

David: 39:44

Technically, those cases are still in play. They're in in what's called stay and could be taken out of stay if if necessary, but they were never ruled on. Eventually, presidential election came around and Joe Biden was elected and on one of Joe Biden's first days issued a whole bunch of things including reexpanding the monument boundaries. And there are some weird legal niceties in that. One could argue technically what he did was create new national monuments.

David: 40:16

And if you wanna go into legal details, you could, but there there's some ambiguity about what happened there. There's also part of this which is called a monument planning process, which involves a whole lot of bureaucracy, but it establishes the the actual rules that implement things that happen that finally did happen under the Trump administration than has happened again under the Biden administration. Those rules are more or less still in effect. It is believed and has been semi stated since Trump's administration has come back that they intend to do something else with them. They haven't yet.

David: 40:50

But it's pretty clear at this point not just from the Trump administration's point of view, but but certain other parts of the political landscape that That one goal is to perhaps cripple what is known as the Antiquities Act. And the Antiquities Act was established during Teddy Roosevelt's term as presidency to help conserve things. And the power over federal land belongs to congress and that act delegated to the president certain powers to protect, including things like the National Park System and but especially National Monument Surfer quite closely linked to that and give the power the president power to protect something, that doesn't need congressional action. And congress, of course, can take a long time to do things because it's a compromise process. And it's it seems to be that that that is being aimed at now, not those specific monuments.

David: 41:41

The the specific monuments may or may not have a role in whatever happens next.

Shelby: 41:46

Right. So still, in some ways, up in the air, what the future of that looks like. So, you know, David, we've talked about some really amazing things related to your career. And you sort of mentioned this earlier on that this wasn't maybe something that you had initially envisioned, sort of where you wanted to go. And so can you talk just a little bit about what it was that sort of set you on this path?

Shelby: 42:11

You mentioned there was a class that you took. How did you sort of get involved in that class in the first place? And what was it about Oh, that

David: 42:17

Paleontology as a whole.

Shelby: 42:18

Yeah, that made you decide this is sort of something you want to think about as a career and then how that sort of evolved.

David: 42:24

Probably by thinking not too far ahead. And so the first step was and I was getting close to graduation deciding what I wanted to do. So I thought well I'll try applying to graduate schools then in and then applying for jobs and end up with a postdoc and and so on. So each one of those steps sort of cemented it further and further and I don't know. The only time I really felt I was consciously making a choice to do that versus something else was soon after getting my PhD and, because of the Internet thing, I got all sorts of job offers.

David: 42:55

And the summer after my PhD, had a this job working for Genentech where my salary was better than it was up until the point that I became department chair a few years ago.

Shelby: 43:08

So very recently.

David: 43:09

Yes. So whatever that would be thirty years later ish. And at that point, it was I did have to think a little bit, do I want to keep doing the the network thing or do I wanna go to take this postdoc? And decided actually, no, I wanna go take the postdoc. And so that's probably when I made my conscious choice.

David: 43:25

But after that, you know, one of the things about research is you do have a chance to guide it, either consciously and or unconsciously have sort of kept it on track with things that I enjoy, which usually is something computational and problem solving and involving, the questions we discussed. And I do like animals, so it also involves animals. And so in that sense, it's enjoyable. I didn't know it at the time, but I like teaching. I like mentoring students, working with people that way.

David: 43:51

And I've it's also and your paleontology is pretty interdisciplinary, so you can kind move between different aspects. And so my PhD was more or less in a biology department. My post doc was more or less in a geology department. Then I worked, for the Natural History Museum in London for a while. Then I taught in a medical school for a while and taught anatomy and then moved into a biology department.

David: 44:13

Now, I then came here in the geology department. So each one of those has had, I guess, opportunities to learn a lot of new things, which keeps it interesting in itself.

Shelby: 44:21

And for students who may be listening that are thinking of these sorts of things, what sort of advice would you have for them? I think a lot of what you said could be taken as really good advice.

David: 44:30

And I guess it depends on exactly what the student is thinking about doing. If the student is thinking they want a university job being a professor, you know, the outcome of that is somewhat uncertain. A lot of people start off thinking they want to do that. They end up doing something else for one reason or the other. Some of it is patience, but also enjoying yourself no matter no matter whether you think you're being successful toward a goal or not.

David: 44:54

And there certainly were all sorts of times. So I think it was seven years between my PhD and when I had a job that whose contract was more than about a year out, which is a long time.

Shelby: 45:04

Mhmm.

David: 45:05

And, you know, quite a few knowing, especially from that that first experience outside of a PhD, one that I could step outside of that and support myself. That was both a comfort to know if this didn't work out, I knew I could do something else. But also there were a lot of times when something was frustrating or disappointing or you started to feel hopeless. I'd sit down and ask myself, okay, so am I not thinking this is a good idea? What would I rather do more?

David: 45:35

And it's usually when I started asking myself, what would I rather do more? And then looking into what the real possibilities were thinking, no, actually, I don't wanna do that more. I'd rather just stick this out for a while. So some of it is just sticking it out and being sure that you're enjoying yourself.

Shelby: 45:49

Yeah. I think that's great advice. So we end each episode with our Yes, Please segment, where we each get a minute to talk passionately about something that we're riveted by in the moment. Would you like to go first or second?

David: 46:02

I can go.

Shelby: 46:03

This will be David Polly's. Yes, please.

David: 46:07

The last year I spent in Finland. Finland is a place that has a very unusual language, Finnish, which is related to very few other languages. And it was completely mysterious. So I was been trying to learn Finnish and the way I eventually decided that I would like to try to learn Finnish is to learn the to read The Hobbit in Finnish because are very into that sort of thing in Finland that there is a excellent translation. I have started trying to read The Hobbit because it's a story I know I've read many times in English and so I kinda know where I am if I can pick out a few words.

David: 46:45

And so that is what I have been trying to do.

Shelby: 46:49

Would you say that that has been so far been a successful attempt at learning a new language?

David: 46:54

Given the first time I visited Finland, they said don't worry, all the signs are also in Swedish and I said well that's not German is impenetrable to me. And it turned out, no. Actually, was really useful. Whereas now at least I'm no longer mystified and I can kind of tell what somebody's having a conversation about. But I can certainly page through The Hobbit and know where I am.

Shelby: 47:12

And how far into The Hobbit have you gotten? The finished version of The Hobbit have you gotten?

David: 47:16

I'm still on the first page.

Shelby: 47:18

Yeah. We'll check back in a future season and see where you're at and how you're doing with that. So, yes, please. Let's go out now that the weather's getting nice and try some local ice cream shops. So I'm a big fan of of, like, regional snacks.

Shelby: 47:34

I've already talked about that a number of times on the show, but also of local restaurants. You know, like, have their own culture that's inherent in the the local places. You go in and people know each other. They do things a little differently. And so I really am not a huge sweets fan, honestly, but I love a local ice cream place.

Shelby: 47:50

So the town I grew up in has the twin. And so anytime I'm home and visiting family, I always try to go. It's much easier to do now that I'm in in Southern Indiana. When I used to live in Arizona or Massachusetts, I'd only go home about three times a year. Two of them were holidays, and the twin was closed, so I was always devastated that I couldn't go there.

Shelby: 48:09

So now I can get it a little more often. But here in Bloomington, I really love Jiffy Treat, but especially Jiffy Treat on the West Side, partially because it's closer to me, but also they have so many more ice cream options. So if you're looking for something to do in the nice weather, go and check out Jiffy Treat.

David: 48:25

I was gonna ask chocolate moose or someplace else, but you have answered that.

Shelby: 48:29

I also enjoy chocolate moose, but yes, something about about Jiffy Treat I think reminds me of of the twin, and so I enjoy going in.

David: 48:37

Quite surprisingly, given that it's a Nordic country, Finns love ice cream.

Shelby: 48:41

Well

David: 48:42

Which is Jatiloa. That's the name for ice

Shelby: 48:45

cream. Say that one more

David: 48:45

time? Jatiloa.

Shelby: 48:47

Perfect. Great way to end the episode. David, thanks for coming on. This has been a blast. And for folks that are listening, we'll see you next week.

Shelby: 49:10

Earth on the Rocks is produced by Cari Metz with artwork provided by Connor Leimgruber, with technical recording managed by Kate Crum and Betsy Leija. Funding for this podcast was provided by the National Science Foundation grant EAR Dash2422824.